Rugby and the rainbow nation

The argument over how to make teams more multiracial and still win

DESPITE the wave of national pride shared by South Africans of all colours as they greeted their rugby team on its return from winning the world cup in France, the raw issue of race in sport, as in other aspects of life in post-apartheid South Africa, is sure to persist. President Thabo Mbeki made it clear that he shared the rainbow nation's joy, even though only two of the team's players were non-white, both of them being Coloured, as mixed-race South Africans are known. Mr Mbeki even called for the coach, Jake White, to stay on, though reports have buzzed around that he may look for a job elsewhere when his contract expires; he is said to be fed up with political interference. Voices in the ruling African National Congress have called for a more “transformative” approach to team selection: ie, more non-whites should be picked.

ReutersHabana flies across the colour bar

Along with cricket, rugby remains a favourite sport of most white South Africans, whereas most of their black compatriots prefer football. Rugby is still particularly popular among Afrikaners, white South Africans of mainly Dutch descent who were the bastion of support for the ideology of segregation and racial domination; of the 32 players in the victorious world cup squad (not just those that actually played in the final game), only four were whites of English-speaking stock, five were Coloured and just one was a black African.

Nelson Mandela's gracious support for the Springboks, as the national team is known, when they last won the cup, on home soil, in 1995, melted the hearts of white South Africa, even of the most diehard white racists. But a feeling still lingers that rugby has yet to shed its image as a predominantly white sport that long symbolised apartheid at its macho worst.

So pressure on the sport's governing body and coaches to ensure that the sport better mirrors the country's racial make-up is intense. (Of South Africa's 48m people, about 38m are black, 4m-plus are white, almost as many are Coloured and about 600,000 are of Asian descent.) Mandatory racial quotas in professional rugby at the top level were dropped in 2004.

But Butana Komphela, who heads Parliament's sports committee, said before the cup that unless the national team became more mixed, its players should have their passports taken away—an idea the government quickly shot down. A bill passed earlier this year gives the sports minister power to intervene in sports disputes and to issue guidelines to speed up integration. The minister, Makhenkesi Stofile, has repeatedly complained about the lack of blacks in the national rugby team.

But since the cup victory, ministers have again insisted that racial quotas will not be imposed. The South African Institute of Race Relations says that making sports more representative is important but the national teams' success, more than their racial make-up, is the real unifier.

It is accepted that the best long-term policy for producing blacker sides is to give black children better sports facilities at school. On this score, Mr Mbeki admits that his government has not done enough. In formerly white state schools (which still have the best facilities), rugby pitches and good coaches abound. Both are still rare in mainly black areas. (Bryan Habana, a lightning-quick winger who was the star of the tournament and has become a hero to South Africans of all hues, comes from a prosperous Coloured family and was educated at a famous and predominantly white school in Johannesburg.)

Jonathan Stones, who runs SA Rugby, the rugby union's commercial arm, says there is a lot of rugby talent among young blacks, and that school and junior national teams are more representative than the senior ones. But a lack of organised support means that many such players get lost during the transition from school to professional rugby. A rugby academy is to open in 2009 in the Eastern Cape, a province with a long tradition of black rugby. That may make up a bit of the difference—and help produce more of a rainbow national team in the not-too-distant future.